Journal of African Media Studies - Deadly Serious: Pandemic Humour, Media and Critical Perspectives, Jun 2022

Social media played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic both as a tool for communicating COVID-19-related messages and as a platform for sharing lighter moments during the distressful time. My article focuses on these lighter moments in the form of internet memes. My interest is on internet memes shared by the cyber public in Malawi. I contend that besides the humour, the memes carry insightful commentary on and criticism of society’s reaction to and handling of the pandemic. The memes poke fun at petrified and distressed Malawians, at some politicians who took advantage of the pandemic to further their own interests and how the outbreak widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Some sinophobic memes accused China of infecting the world with virus. My methodological and theoretical approaches are based on netnographic studies and theories of humour (nature and function) respectively.

Humour as a communicative activity is meant to evoke laughter in people, hence, the amusement of an utterance is typically judged by its response from the audience. This study examines amusing tweets on the COVID-19 pandemic and traces the intertextual origin of discourse in some of the tweets. It primarily explores the core role of humour as a cultural tool for satire. The incongruity theory of humour was employed as a theoretical framework for the study as it helps to better understand the reason Nigerians’ tweets are antithetical to prevailing circumstances in the country. This is a qualitative research design where a content analysis of 125 amusing tweets relating to the COVID-19 pandemic was sampled on Twitter. Search terms such as #May4, #3rdMainlandBridge, #KoroIsOurMan and #Obanikoro were employed to identify the pattern of humour in selected tweets as Nigerians’ tweets at the period revolved more around each of the hashtags. Open messages sent via Twitter were assessed adopting purposive sampling technique. Particular characteristics such as location of users, timeline of the lockdown and its relaxation (25 March–30 June 2020) formed the parameters for the selection of the tweets. Though the coronavirus scourge has left thousands of people dead in its wake, Nigerians’ tweets and memes during the lockdown did not in any way reflect gloom or sombreness. This will pique an average readers’ interest as there is a violation of normative expectations. The results therefore reaffirm the age-long relevance of the incongruous in humour and the satirical role of intertextuality in discourse.

Nigerians have intriguing penchant for humour even in moments of life tribulations, grief and uncertainties. They tend to defy being overwhelmed by sorrow, fear or even their helplessness in the face of adversity. Consequently, despite the global hysteria that has trailed the outbreak of the dreaded coronavirus, Nigerians stoically manage their grief through humour. The growing predilection for humour production and consumption in the country, which is partly occasioned by the advent of social media and an unprecedented growth of the Night of a Thousand Laughs (a stand-up comedy industry), deserves scholarly attention on account of its social and mental health impacts. This work blends Freudian psychoanalysis with Merton’s functional analysis to build a framework of analysis that captures the psychogenesis and consequences of Nigerians’ humorous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Semiotic method was used to analyse some selected humorous memes, cartoons, pictures and videos on or about COVID-19 obtained from WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube between March and August, 2020. In so doing, these humorous stuffs were subjected to both broad and context specific analyses. It was found that although the humours were expressed in different styles, they are mostly aggressive (intended to ridicule their leaders using satire, sarcasm), and self-enhancing (used as mechanisms to cope with boredom and anxiety occasioned by the pandemic) and, in a few cases, self-defeating (involved self-mockery: use of remarks that are self-demeaning or self-disparaging). The article concludes that the COVID-19-induced humours are a route to their peddlers’ unconscious realm and a defence mechanism to anxiety, stress and boredom. While the spread of these jokes has manifest function of self-enhancing, their latent consequence is that they trivialize the pandemic and, by extension, make people reluctant to take precautionary measures and comply with the established guidelines and protocols.

Coronavirus popularly known as COVID-19 is a pandemic that stormed the globe and rendered strong nations helpless and even the world powers, powerless. Initially, the Nigerian government was reluctant to put measures in place or lock its borders until a returnee was diagnosed after he had infected some people. This necessitated several measures including total lockdown, social distancing and improved personal hygiene to forestall its spread. Moreover, Nigerians believe that the state of the nation is even worse than this pandemic and, thus, have developed mastery, especially via satire in weathering any kind of storm. It is therefore, not surprising that the Facebook has become a veritable platform where Nigerians evoke humour while exposing human foibles in their linguistic disposition, with the intention to improve the society. This study, therefore, examined the satirical devices in the Facebook posts of Nigerians with the aim of teasing out the ideologies portrayed in relation to the existing social, economic and political attitude of the people towards the pandemic. Consequently, 22 Facebook posts were purposively selected for analysis, drawing input from Horatian’s approach to satire and Fairclough’s (1995) sociocultural approach to Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis reveals various satirical elements deployed as a subtle and effective alternative to contest power abuse, social injustice and propagate change. The study also reveals the wittiness and absurdity of satire that makes it a ready tool to unbridle people’s feelings; laden with different ideologies with the aim of relaxing tension and catalysing transformation in the society. Moreover, the import of weathering the storm becomes bare as an essential make-up of Nigerians; the tinge of humour intended in the posts relieves perceived tension and reminds the readers to take life easy, thus, making the study quite engaging.

From the outbreak of coronavirus to the institution of lockdown, and other regulatory measures, digital media platforms have been agog with memes associated with COVID-19 and pandemic-induced policies. Hence, there is a need to understand how the digital community discusses the pandemic through internet memes. There is a dearth of scholarship focusing on the utilization of memes for public engagement during public health crises. This study adds to the understanding of the discursive functions of memes by exploring emergent themes in coronavirus-related memes and investigating the discursive strategies applied by Nigerians to portray the pandemic. A qualitative analysis of 170 purposively selected COVID-19-related memes revealed the prevalence of six overarching themes. It was observed that meme creators employed a combination of humour, non-humour and sarcasm in driving awareness about the pandemic and highlighting existing but less-discussed sociopolitical and socio-economic issues exacerbated by the recent health crisis. The findings identified the utilization of memes to create awareness, highlight the negative impact of COVID-19 regulations on the lives of the average Nigerians and critique government’s handling of the pandemic.

This article examines theatre as a creative journalistic media deployed by theatre practitioners to map experiences of Zimbabweans during the COVID-19-induced lockdown. When the first positive case of COVID-19 was reported in March 2020, the Zimbabwe government, like many other countries, responded by introducing restrictions for public gatherings and ultimately a lockdown including arts events. Yet, theatricality has refused to capitulate. Artists re-invented their theatre productions into theatrical comic and satirical works posted on various social media platforms, in an effort to make sense of the pandemic, bring laughter and address a serious complex situation. We examine how artists deployed theatre to journal, capture and document the citizen’s collective experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, for both the present and posterity. We are specifically interested in analysing the different ways art is deployed to provide entertainment, a broader understanding and awareness of the social, psychological and economic impact of COVID-19 for the present and future generations.

This article draws upon research exploring a project that combines edutainment and participatory communication strategies as an approach to social change in Malawi. Throughout the research, I take a critical stance that seeks to uplift voices of an audience attending a radio listening club (RLC) and therefore utilize participatory methods to co-create the body of knowledge with study participants. In this article, I query RLC audience’s thoughts of the project’s relevance and influence in their daily lives. Oriented by Hall’s concepts of encoding and decoding, I analyse my data focusing on the dynamics between the objectives of the producers and the lived reality of the participants. Findings reveal that audience’s motivation for continued attendance of the RLC is different to that intended in the encoding process; rather audiences negotiate the relevance of messages to their own needs, those of their children and utilize the space to extend their social capital.

Against many odds, the Hausa film industry alias Kannywood has come of age. The film industry survives several pressing challenges from within and outside Nigeria, perhaps more than its counterparts anywhere else. Although there is no denying that the quality of its output has significantly improved, its survival has little or nothing to do with that. Many critics, including the Motion Pictures Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MOPPAN) leadership, call ‘bad’ films, are still being made. Romantic movies, laden with a typical and predictable pattern of the love triangle, song and dance sequences among other appropriated and plagiarized Bollywood modalities, remain the favourite of producers and arguably that of the audience. However, according to some surveys, such films lack merit in the realm of critical film discourse in Africa and beyond. This article is set out to discuss this issue through a content analysis of a recent film titled Sareena (Nuhu 2019). The movie, released in 2019, is a bloated, implausible melodrama and a direct mimicry of a famous Indian film, Kaabil (Gupta 2017).